Riana Rouge

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Platforms:

PC

Publisher:

Black Dragon Publishing

Developer:

Black Dragon Publishing

Genres:

Adventure / Point and Click

Release Date:

1997

Game Modes:

Singleplayer

Fuzzy, black and white, poorly lip-synched, and badly acted, the opening cutscene paints the portrait of a nondescript secretary, Riana Rouge, who, in the act of extracting her boss’s paws from beneath the hemline of a defenseless co-worker, is hurled into another dimension (?!). All of a sudden, as though in Munchkin Land, full-color graphics and video appear. They don’t help.

The game presents three worlds of fantasy to solve, one per CD, as the scantily clad Riana attempts to discover her true identity, locate her amorously grateful co-worker, restore the Worldmaker (don’t ask) to the Midworld Temple, wield large automatic weapons, and defeat the Evil Stranger. See Riana’s bosoms strain against leather in the Prison World, against brocade in the World of Indulgences, and against chiffon in the Island World. In the latter, Riana attempts to liberate the male and female denizens, the Sinep and Yssup creatures (kids, don’t read those backwards), from a computerized Orb.

The Emotivator, a device allowing the player to choose a particular mood-color for verbal responses, is a cumbersome, ineffectual tool (although choosing “red” in one instance does provide what has to be the best line in the game, “Take me to the mountaintop, Angel Baby!”). Although some will be titillated by the nudity and racy full motion video scenes (Gillian Bonner as Riana is a knockout), they do not save this sparsely-puzzled, badly rendered, poorly acted would-be adventure. One or two of the puzzles do show some promise, but they are a mere drop in the gene pool.

See Riana’s bosoms strain against mediocrity in a script that couldn’t possibly be saved. You’ll find yourself sporadically laughing and shaking your head, wondering if they could possibly have been serious. Let’s hope, for their sake, that they were not.